Ga,

I never suggested that politicians make engineering decisions.  I assume the NRC would oversee and make decisions regarding the best solutions to nuclear generation problems.  That’s why we have the NRC isn’t it ?

Give our engineers a chance to come up with satisfactory solution. This is after all a big country with big oceans surrounding it. I have confidence that our engineers have conscience necessary to make the right decisions.

Not meaning to attack your character, I shall attack your point, which is absurd.

Yes, “engineers” are generally a great bunch. I know many.

Engineers and engineering are not the problem (they are the archetects of all solutions, actually).

However, engineers do not run the country, or make the ultimate desicions, politicians do. And you cannot, ever, say such things about politicians.

How many disasters have occured in our history not because of faulty engineering but of the lack of applying proper engineering?

I rest my case.

Nuclear Power can be made safe, as the many U.S. nuclear subs attest. I know someone who went through Nuke School, he’d live on a nuclear sub but not near a civilian nuclear plant.

The cost to make nuclear power safe means that no civilian nuclear plant will ever be safe enough. Without a “socialist” approach, i.e. make them without regard to “profit”, no U.S. corporate nuclear plant will be safe enough.

Now I say “safe” in that they can be made to withstand accident.

But, no nuclear power plant can ever be made “clean.” Which means that a nuclear plant produces a horrible, poisonous waste that will never, ever go away.

Therefore, nuclear power is ultimately more harmful to the earth than good.

But there will always be some corporate interests that will make money of them, so therefore, they will get built.

An interesting read atheo. If it is true that the incidence of leukemia increases in a given proximity to nuclear facilities, then perhaps guidelines could be established for location and minimum distances to human habitation near nuclear facilities. I’m certainly not an engineer or expert in this field, but our universities and the public sector has many qualified people to establish these guidelines.

To refer back to something I wrote in an earlier post, we in the USA are apparently comfortable with 25,000 highway deaths ( before air bags and strict drunk driving laws it was much higher).  It is one of the dangers of driving.  All human activity poses some risk. Sometimes people get hysterical about risks that have a very low probability of occurence.  I think John Stossel did a piece on this once. It was interesting to see the odd things that people fear.  Just think of the irrational fear of flying.  Jet aircraft are the among the safest places to be yet millions fear them.

The statement by Ernest to the effect that anyone who considers nuclear power must be criminally insane adds to the hysteria (although I don’t think he meant to go that far).  And his latest post inferring that some of us want to silence science in favor of money or religion is simply not true, and I resent it.

Children and young people show elevated leukaemia rates near nuclear facilities
Review covers 136 countries in US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Spain
Leukaemia rates in children and young people are elevated near nuclear facilities, but no clear explanation exists to explain the rise, according to a research review published in the July issue of European Journal of Cancer Care.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina carried out a sophisticated meta-analysis of 17 research papers covering 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, the USA, Germany, Japan and Spain.

They found that death rates for children up to the age of nine were elevated by between five and 24 per cent, depending on their proximity to nuclear facilities, and by two to 18 per cent in children and young people up to the age of 25.

Incidence rates were increased by 14 to 21 per cent in zero to nine year olds and seven to ten percent in zero to 25 year-olds.

“Childhood leukaemia is a rare disease and nuclear sites are commonly found in rural areas, which means that sample sizes tend to be small” says lead author Dr Peter J Baker.

“The advantage of carrying out a meta-analysis is that it enables us to draw together a number of studies that have employed common methods and draw wider conclusions.”

Eight separate analyses were performed – including unadjusted, random and fixed effect models – and the figures they produced showed considerable consistency.

But the authors point out that dose-response studies they looked at - which describe how an organism is affected by different levels of exposure - did not show excess rates near nuclear facilities.

“Several difficulties arise when conducting dose-response studies in an epidemiological setting as they rely on a wide range of factors that are often hard to quantify” explains Dr Baker. “It is also possible that there are environmental issues involved that we don’t yet understand.

“If the amount of exposure were too low to cause the excess risk, we would expect leukaemia rates to remain consistent before and after the start-up of a nuclear facility. However, our meta-analysis, consistently showed elevated illness and death rates for children and young people living near nuclear facilities.”

The research review looked at studies carried out between 1984 and 1999, focusing on research that provided statistics for individual sites on children and young people aged from zero to 25.

Four studies covered the UK, with a further three covering just Scotland. Three covered France, two looked at Canada and there was one study each from the USA, Japan, Spain, the former East Germany and the former West Germany.

“Although our meta-analysis found consistently elevated rates of leukaemia near nuclear facilities, it is important to note that there are still many questions to be answered, not least about why these rates increase” concludes Dr Baker.

“Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the excess of childhood leukaemia in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, including environmental exposure and parental exposure. Professor Kinlen from Oxford University has also put forward a hypothesis that viral transmission, caused by mixing populations in a new rural location, could be responsible.

“It is clear that further research is needed into this important subject.”

The dangers of radioactivity are provable by repeatable testing of results after exposing organisms to radiation. Anyone who questions the danger must contend with the fact that they can’t repeat the experiment and not come up with the same result. There is no comparable scientific proof of the global warming computer modelling forcasts.

Sorry, nf, but I am not prepared to “lower” myself to the point of turning a blind eye to those who, at this late date and with the content of our scientific knowledge, would continue to deny the dangers of either radioactivity or global warming.  I am sorry but I have no tolerance for those who would silence science in favor of the religion of the almighty dollar.

If that assessment seems harsh, I can only say that it is intended as such.

Everyone’s a fool. Everyone but you Ernest. I guess its just not possible for you to carry on a discussion without trying to attack personally everyone who disagrees with you.  You come across as someone who may have a decent mind and education. Why not try to lower yourself just a tad and have a little respect for everyone else here.

Gary Maxwell, Rick and Paolo have offered excellent input - they actually sound concerned and have well thought out points. After all, we actually do have nuclear plants operating in this country that work. Many of these plants were designed in the fifties and still work.  It stands to reason that the technology has advanced during the past 50 years. Even if nuclear winds up costing more than fossil fuel generation, it will be worth it to eliminate the air polutants. The risk, as pointed out by all of us, exists no matter what we do to generate power.  We are all for renewable energy sources but everything I read points to the fact that renewable cannot replace fossil fuels anytime in the near future.

Atheo, excellent link in response to Paolo, our resident nuclear industry propagandist who tells US--nuclear waste, no problem! 

His assertions are reminiscent of another time in our history when, in 1945, as a result of a arrangement between General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, and Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the NY Times, William Laurence secretly became a paid publicist for the Manhattan Project at the same time he continued to act as a reporter for the Times.  As a result of the arrangement, Laurence was given access to top secret information and was present at atomic bomb testing in New Mexico.  He both authored press releases and statements for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stinson even as he was writing a series of articles for the New York Times which sought to dismiss information about the deadly effects of radiation, then being reported as a mysterious “atomic plague.” The Laurence-authored New York Times pieces contended that “atomic plague” was simply Japanese propaganda.  For this, Laurence and the Times were awarded a Pullitzer Prize.

So now, here comes Paolo and his friend, the nuclear power plant operator, telling us to ignore the massive scientific data on the crisis in nuclear waste.  It’s safe.  One wonders when Paolo will step forward to tell us that our concerns are the product of al Qaeda propaganda, or some such rot.  One wonders when this fool will come forward to advocate resurrecting above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.  Yeah, there was a time where our government said that was safe, too.

Paolo,

try this link:

http://romunov.blogsome.com/2006/10/15/

“View the question scientifically and dispassionately”

That would be inhuman

vet240,

birth rates from native born Americans barely sustain the population, growth is negligible. Yes Japan and Sweden have lower rates but they have better educational systems. The correlation is perfect.

by atheo on 7/17

You missed the point. In nations that provide good education and employment for women the population growth rate has declined precipitously, not just in a few cases, but in every case. The only cause of significant population growth in the U.S. is our high rate of immigration and their offspring, otherwise we would have negative population numbers. It really does work, no question about it.

ahteo I thought you might want to up-date your Wikipedia regarding the “decline of births.

I grabbed this just now off a news report:

“Still, half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended and half of those end in abortion. The U.S. rate of teen births is still the highest in the industrialized world—it’s about twice as high as the rate in Canada and about seven times higher than teen birthrates in such countries as Japan, Denmark and Sweden, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Nearly a third of American girls and young women will get pregnant at least once before they reach 20.”

It would appear that education isn’t enough.

Rick, the operator at the nuclear plant, put it very well. For anyone really willing to look dispassionately at all the potential ways to generate power, nuclear is clearly superior in almost all ways.

We tend to fear new technologies because we do not understand them. Mention radioactivity, and people immediately break into a sweat, remembering the old sci-fi films of the 1950’s with giant insects created by radioactivity.

Nuclear waste is a total non-problem. It is small in quantity, and can either be diluted back to natural background radiation levels, or concentrated (not my first choice), encased in non-soluble glass, and dumped in the Marianas Trench.

Other forms of power generation deal with their waste by “dumping” them, too--into people’s lungs! It is a fact that coal burning plants put millions of times more pollutants into the atmosphere than nuclear power. In fact, by releasing radioactive carbon isotopes, coal fired plants even release much more radioactive waste than nuclear plants.

But there’s that fear of what we do not understand. Coal-fired plants are old technology. No one is afraid of them, because we all understand the concept of burning coal. But because most people don’t even know the slightest thing about nuclear power, they are easy prey for fear-mongers.

In the long run, folks, there really is no other choice (barring some other technological breakthrough like fusion power), if you want an advanced, industrial civilization, which takes power by the gigawatt. Other forms of power, like solar, wind, and biomass, are simply too dilute to supply the amount of power required to run industrial societies.

View the question scientifically and dispassionately, and you will conclude that nuclear power is the way to go.

Atheo, thanks for the link.  As a resident of California I found the article to be exceedingly troubling.

nf,

I’ll give you a billion to find a place to shove it. It’s all passed onto the ratepayers anyhow and wer’e tripple subsidised.

atheo.  Maybe we aren’t offering the right incentives.

nf,

It’s now over 50 stories and I need to find something to shove it under but nobody wants it near them.

Well atheo, just how high is that skyscraper ?

nf,

Iv’e been constructing a skyscraper since the fifties. One of these days I should work on the foundation.LOL

nf, I have been aware of Tesla Motors.  While the company states that it plans on developing plug in electrics for general consumer use, the vehicle they have produced, the Tesla Roadster, at $92,000 is a bit pricey.  Moreover, it is a bit too powerful for my taste (0 to 60 in four seconds) and, as while it has a sleek body, as a two seater it is not functional for the average family.  It has a 200 + mile range on a single charge.

But Tesla is not the first to develop an electric vehicle for consumer use--not by a long shot.  If you go to http://www.pluginamerica.com/whyev.shtml

you will find a photo of a young woman in Cincinatti plugging in her all electric vehicle.  The photo was taken in 1912.

Also at that site you can purchase a copy of the DVD, “Who killed the electric car?” which should be seen by all.  GMs EVs were quite successful--too successful in fact.  They not only posed a direct threat to the oil cartel but, because the damn things do not require a tenth of the replacement parts of autos with internal combustion engines, GM feared it could lose a bundle in repair/replacement work required for the older technology.  The EVs were produced only because California law in the 1980s mandated a percentage of zero emission autos.  GM refused to sell them, instead leasing them, mostly to celebrities.  When industry lobbying led to a change in the law, GM took in the EVs as the leases ran out.  Rather than accept a multi-million dollar offer from the lessees for the remaining EVs, GM transported these perfectly functional vehicles on flat beds, out to the dessert where they had them smashed in wrecking yards.  They did not want people to have access to this successful technology.

While the DVD includes an interview with an inventor who had developed a battery with a 300 mile range, the real potential lies in the development of photovaic cell technology that would extend the time between needed charges through solar energy.

Don’t count on your friends in the Bush administration ever being willing to assist in the development of solar/EV technologies.

atheo,

Of course not.  But we have along with the French (who are 80 % nuclear) and other countries been using nuclear since the fifties.  Yes the waste is a problem, but not a deal breaker. It is a danger also, but it has to be weighed along with the dangers of the alternatives.

nf,

Solutions first. Would you build a skyscraper with no foundation?

atheo, I think you may be just a little dramatic in your assumption that our nuclear waste will be a burden.  Give our engineers a chance to come up with satisfactory solution.  This is after all a big country with big oceans surrounding it.  I have confidence that our engineers have conscience necessary to make the right decisions.  You do trust them to build the jets that you travel in, don’t you ?

nf,

“how far are we willing to retreat in order to make it safe enough to satisfy everyone? ... Even if we get it wrong, the Earth won’t last forever anyway”

You hit it, how do we decide that we have the right to burden 100,000+ generations with attending to our nuclear waste? I’m willing to accept risks to myself, not my children. This is the logic behind California’s and New Mexico’s bicycle helmet laws: over 18? do what you want. Are you sharing your Riesling with minors? I won’t be here forever, the responsible thing to do is not to be a burden on my progeny.

Fricken,

Do you think a coal plant would have been shut down as readily?

atheo, the dangers of nuclear power plants are well known.  Sure, some will die as a result of the operation of these facilities. However we already accept 25,000 highway deaths annually in the USA as well as other technology enabled fatalities, such as plane and train crashes, factory and other workplace deaths, recreational accidents, radon infested homes, criminal activity that could be avoided by longer prison terms, cigarettes, alcohol and other recreational drugs (of which I’m now partaking - riesling wine), where do I stop. The point is that we live in a fantastic albeit dangerous world in the 21st century - how far are we willing to retreat in order to make it safe enough to satisfy everyone ?  I’m willing to tolerate nuclear power in lieu of the alternatives. Perhaps you aren’t. But it is the consensus of our society that will decide. Even if we get it wrong, the Earth won’t last forever anyway.

Atheo, do you suppose that other types of power plants are impervious to earth quakes?

Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Nukes
Japan Dodges a Radioactive Bullet
By RUSSELL D. HOFFMAN

Sunday a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Japan. The entire Kashiwazaki nuclear power generating station, the world’s largest nuke facility with seven reactors, shut down.

At least one reactor spewed “slightly radioactive” coolant into the Sea of Japan. But early reports, of course, assured the public there were NO radioactive leaks.

A fire in the switchyard kept local firefighters busy for more than two hours, spewing thick, terrifying black smoke into the air (but the real danger from a nuclear reactor—radioactive poison—is INVISIBLE).

Four reactors were automatically SCRAMed, a violent, sudden, dangerous stoppage. The other three reactors at the facility were shut down “voluntarily, for inspection.”

Kashiwazaki’s 8,212 megawatts of total generating capacity is enough for about 16 million homes in Japan (or for about half many homes in America).

So just as hospitals, pumping stations, and individuals desperately needed power to recover from the earthquake, NONE was being delivered by the facility, after an earthquake that was far smaller than the size the facility is supposed to be able to withstand.

The feared tsunami never came. Nukes worldwide are NOT protected against reasonably foreseeable tsunami wave heights.

Japan dodged a bullet THIS TIME, but disaster awaits ...

Russell D. Hoffman, a computer programmer in Carlsbad, California, has written extensively about nuclear power. His essays have been translated into several different languages and published in more than a dozen countries. He can be reached at: rhoffman at animatedsoftware dot com

nf,

You simply aren’t factoring in the estimated 100,000+ victims of Chernoble. Yes cancer deaths have to be estimated, they aren’t as plainly obvious as mining accidents. You also fail to account for the 100,000+ victims of atmospheric nuclear testing in the 50’s. The problem with nuclear poison is that it keeps killing, generation after generation til the end of the Earths days.

Nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter. Nuclear scientists will figure out how to deal with radioactive waste, any day now. Criminally arrogant science all originally propelled and funded by the “need” for ever bigger bombs.

Nuclear cheerleaders like to pooh-pooh truly renewable energy by citing its need of government subsidies. They conveniently omit the fact that nuclear power has always and still sucks up the vast majority of those taxpayer subsidies.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/energy/nuclear_power.htm

Promotion of the nuclear energy industry is an attempt to recoup money poured down the nuke rat hole.

Ernest, it sounds like you’re giving the final word on this discussion.  If its true that anyone advocating nuclear power is criminally insane, then why go any further with these comments.

For the time being it looks like nuclear power has been safer than anything else out there.  How many people worldwide have died in coal mines or finding, drilling, transporting and refining petroleum products since these fossil fuels first made their debut, not to mention the wildlife that have suffered through the oil spills. Its a dangerous life out there.

There’s a company out there in silicon valley by the name of Tesla. http://www.teslamotors.com. Look it up.  They appear to be serious about building the first consumer acceptable electric cars.  If what they are doing is successful, we will have a great need for electric generation capacity somewhere down the road. The combination of nuclear replacing fossil fuels for electric generation and down the road providing the “electric” fuel for our cars is hard to resist, don’t you agree ?

Nuclear Surge
By HARVEY WASSERMAN

A major pro-nuke “surge” against the renewable solution to global warming is about to erupt in California.

State assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has moved for a statewide vote to allow new nuclear power plants to be built in the Golden State. He wants to repeal the 1976 law requiring a solution to the nuke waste problem before new reactors are built. A business cartel says it wants to build a new reactor near downtown near downtown Fresno. (For more information on the California situation, visit http://www.a4nr.org/)

...There have been numerous rationales put forth for building more reactors. Except to an entrenched corporate power elite, none of them make any sense.

Some advocates claim new reactors can fight global warming. In fact, through their own “normal” emissions, in the construction process, in mining, milling and enriching fuel, in decommissioning, in managing radioactive waste, in accounting for inevitable catastrophic accidents and terror attacks, in weapons proliferation, and much much more, atomic reactors are a global warming nightmare.

Some also claim nukes will generate cheap electricity. But fifty years of proven failure (the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957) says exactly the opposite. Overall, the nuke power experiment has been a trillion dollar disaster, with explosions, melt-downs, cost overruns, expensive failures, massive subsidies, undoable insurance, deregulatory bailouts and much more on the debit sheet.

Overall, at its ultimate corporate root, the new nuke push is a coup d’etat, a rightist putsch to prevent the community ownership of our Solartopian energy supply.

The irony in California could not be more obvious. The only way the industry can build new nukes is for the community to NOT require a solution to the radioactive waste problem…

Nukes aren’t safe.!!!
A nuke plant leaked radioactive water two days ago in Japan. Reason; an earthquake.How many Reactors are close to or on active fault lines? 
Do we think Chernobyl is over, just because it was filled with concrete and it happened all of twenty years ago?
I’m gonna get sensationalist and biblical, because this is just creepy. One of the prophesies of the Book of Revelation states that one third of the world’s water would be poisoned by wormwood. Chernobyl is Russian for wormwood.

Nuclear power is expensive and dangerous.  Setting aside this latest incident and the near meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, there is a major and recurring threat that arises not only from nuclear power generating reactors but from the nuclear weapons industry--nuclear waste.  There were six disposal sites in the U.S.  We are now down to two.  The Nuclear Information & Resource Center (NIRS) released a recent report revealing that DOE policies permit the release of radioactive waste from nuclear weapons facilities into landfills, which, per the report’s author, Diane D’Arrigo could lead to “the potential for the materials to enter the recycling stream to make everyday household and personal items or to be used to build roads, schools and playgrounds.”

http://www.radwaste/outofcontrol/outofcontrol.htm

There are no safe levels of radioactivity.  There are much cheaper, clean and virtually untapped alternatives in wind, solar and geothermal.  Only the criminally insane would advocate the development of nuclear power.

Vet240,

“Second it will have to be an enforced reality. Education and voluntary participation just won’t work.”

You missed the point. In nations that provide good education and employment for women the population growth rate has declined precipitously, not just in a few cases, but in every case. The only cause of significant population growth in the U.S. is our high rate of immigration and their offspring, otherwise we would have negative population numbers. It really does work, no question about it.

The population discusion has become a bit silly. Not that population isn’t a problem.
The comments on education and jobs for women is correct. If they have these things on average they have fewer kids, i.e. they know about birth control, and have other proirities other than large family size. Social Security or such is also important, as the motivation to have a lot of children to take care of you when old is removed.

Living three miles or less than work? Thats pretty impossible in modern society -especially in multiple employed families. I wish I coulda got a house within five miles of work, but in crazy California I had to go twenty to get affordable housing. So my bike is for exercise, and the car for commuting (ugh). But at least I got a Pruis now.

Enemy of the state, you repeat specious malthusian claims that we are running out of fuel. Does it not bother you that this type of alarmism has occured in 25 year cycles for the past century? Meanwhile, nuclear dangers are real and provable by repeatable examination. Furthermore, nuclear contamination is forever.

KASHIWAZAKI, Japan, July 17 (Reuters) - Officials at the world’s biggest nuclear power plant admitted on Tuesday there had been more radiation leaks after an earthquake...while TEPCO had initially said that the lethal earthquake had not caused any leaks, it revealed later on Monday night that 1,200 litres of radioactive water had sloshed into the sea from its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata.

The company added that the quake was stronger than its reactors had been designed to withstand.

Then on Tuesday, a TEPCO official told a news conference that checks of 22,000 drums containing nuclear waste at a warehouse had found about 100 had fallen over and “several” lost their lids.

Only about half the drums had been inspected so far, and it was not immediately clear from the official’s comments whether there was any impact on the environment or people…

Frikken Kids, great post.  Sure, there is a (remote) possibility of a Chernobyl-like disaster here killing perhaps thousands, but what about the effects of pollution, won’t the long term effects including global warming certainly kill millions. There is no certainty of a future nuclear accident (we build the plants much better than the Russians did), but pollution is for sure.  As the old one liner goes “more people have died in the back seat of Ted Kennedy’s car than in nuclear plant accidents here”.  Let’s exploit solar (both wind and panels) to the utmost, but let’s try to replace fossil fuels as much as possible with nuclear.

I too fear the effects of religion far more than anything else.

Sorry for the double post...f#$&#xki;ng computers!

First off, I’m not a pro-nuclear anti-everything else fascist that I’m sure somebody will want to call me for disagreeing with this article.  I would love a clean and safe solution to our power needs that will actually work.

That said, this article seems to be pretty much the standard scare mongering BS about nuclear power with no suggestion whatsoever as to another alternative and no mention of any bad points about other sources.  Nuclear: bad. Other stuff: all smiles and sunshine!

Building solar panels and windmills uses up a lot of energy and resources too, but the author doesn’t mention that as a problem.  How much steel would have to be mined and processed and how much energy would be burned to populate the globe with enough windmills to power all our needs?  How much would it cost and what waste would be produced to build enough solar panels?  I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that the author of this article ignored them while vilifying nuclear power for those reasons. 

As for back yards, a modern nuclear power plant would be less dangerous to have in your (or my) backyard than a coal plant. 

Certainly the possibility of terrorists using the waste as weapons is very real.  This is a problem better dealt with by concerted efforts to bring the human race out of its infantile reliance on fairy tales and willingness to murder for them. 

Personally, I’m much more scared of religion than I am of nuclear power.  It poses a greater threat.

#87354 by Lefty on 7/16 at 7:56 pm
(493 comments total)

“Imagine if the U.S. had invested the money wasted on the fraudulent war in Iraq on wind and solar energy technology!”

What!!!  Are you some kind of commie faggot?  Why...you would put the oil companies out of business!  Why, we would have no excuse to bomb the shit out of non-white countries.  Why, people like you should...should...should just lead us out of this shit!  Go dude!!!

#87354 by Lefty on 7/16 at 7:56 pm
(493 comments total)

Imagine if the U.S. had invested the money wasted on the fraudulent war in Iraq on wind and solar energy technology!

What!!!  Are you some kind of commie faggot?  Why...you would put the oil companies out of business!  Why we would have no excuse to bomb the shit out of non-white countries.  Why, people like you should...should...should just lead us out of this shit!

NF

I thought enough of your last comment to repost it here!

Well how about this.  We get the feds to pass a law requiring everyone to live no more than 3 miles from their workplace.  Even walking that would only amount to a maximum 1 hour commute (bicycle 10 minutes) not to mention the health benefits obtained by the exercise. This in turn would lower health care costs. The country would save billions in fuel costs and a lot less polution to boot. Roads would require less maintenance .... heck I could go on and on, but no way are the greedy corporations going to go for this.

Again your ideas are inovative. I might suggest a small modification. What if we demand that our City and County Planners quit listening to the bankers adn real estate moguls and corporations and force them to build in such a way that would make your ideas work. Just say no to urban sprawl!

Well how about this.  We get the feds to pass a law requiring everyone to live no more than 3 miles from their workplace.  Even walking that would only amount to a maximum 1 hour commute (bicycle 10 minutes) not to mention the health benefits obtained by the exercise. This in turn would lower health care costs. The country would save billions in fuel costs and a lot less polution to boot. Roads would require less maintenance .... heck I could go on and on, but no way are the greedy corporations going to go for this.

nf:
Sorry I had to laugh at your ideas a little, even though they were quite inovative!

Actually, we have to insure that the geneticists and other scientists stay away from wanting to meddle with mother earth.

In order for any type of birth lottery to work, first it has to be completely random. No special people will get special treatment by being moved to the front of the line and there can be no selectivity. Second it will have to be an enforced reality. Education and voluntary participation just won’t work.

It may not sound plausable now but in the not too distant future when we run out of food and energy it will become the only solution.

And that baloney about populating another planet? Totally beyond our means, even for just a few.

Good thinking NF!
At least some of us realize it’s more about the size of us than it is about the size of our cars!

atheo:
global education with regards to birth control has been shown to be ineffective in slowing the birth rate. I understand China has had a form of national lottery for some years.

I don’t understand how employment opportunities for women would have any effect on the birth rate either. I have understood that America does have Social Security for the elderly and the disabled. Again this is not an issue with regard to over-population.

Some twenty years ago I read an article about the optimum world population. It seems some of the experts then felt the earth could sustain at least 9 Billion. I assume that meant that when we hit that number we would have to quit having births. I felt at the time that they were wrong on the 9 Billion. I think the number was passed some time ago at 3 Billion.

I also think they were only half done with their projection due to the fact that people would still be having births when we hit 9 billion. They should have offered a solution to this.

Nuclear is not nearly as dangerous or environmentally harmful as most on the left believe. That said, it still recieves too large a proportion of a too small energy research and development budget. The main plea I’d like to make is to not
shutdown the existing plants until we have low-carbon alternatives. Rather than fighting a Nukes versus no-Nukes battle, we would spend our efforts more succesfully fighting for a much more aggressive renewables research program.

In any case, the Japanese Nuclear plant is not on fire. The pictures/report I saw shows a transformer not unlike those in your local substation on fire (they use oil as insulation and heat transfer agent).

In any case we’ve been getting lots of scary news about the soon to be serious imbalance between oil supply and demand. First the international energy agency, warning it will become severe within five years. Today the US oil industry claims world demand will grow by fifty percent in twenty years, but production is likely to peak at maybe 10-20% more than current rates before than (my prediction).

Imagine if the U.S. had invested the money wasted on the fraudulent war in Iraq on wind and solar energy technology!

nf,

A big factor in all of this is the fact that the current generation of nuclear plants is nearing the end of it’s life span. If we simply don’t build new ones, they will be terminated. At this point the worst thing that could happen is a carbon tax or cap and trade scheme which would have the effect of making nuclear power cost competitive. A better idea would be to strictly limit r&d;subsidies to true renewables, but don’t look for that from Gore.

nf,

I don’t claim to have all the solutions, but a new generation of U.S. nukes (power and weopons) will create a global race to dig up all the uranium and convert it to weopons grade. If the U.S. were to comply with the NPT and reduce it’s WMDs, that would reduce the incentive for other countries to amass bombs.

atheo, how do the get the French ( 80 % nuclear) to shut down their reactors?  It appears that they are in love with nuclear.

vrt240,

If you are serious about population reduction you need to focus on global education and employment opportunities for women and social security for the disabled and elderly. That’s what is proven to work and it’s within the bounds of human decency and morality.

Hey vet240, as an alternative to baby permits, why not just get our genetic engineers to engineer human offspring so that the average human being will be reduced from say 180 pounds to say 60 pounds.  That would in effect triple the size of the Earth and allow us to re-engineer everything to accomodate the new mini-humans.  Cars, trains, planes would be much smaller using much less fuel.  Homes of course would be smaller requiring less fuel to heat and cool. People would consume far less food… heck I could go on and on but alas, the corporations would never go for it.

You may slow down the process that will ultimately lead to the earth rejecting humans like your own anti-bodies protect you against infections.

You can only slow it down by focusing on new or alternative energy sources.

The only real and effective way to stop the earth from rejecting us is to stop the population growth through enforced reproductive laws.

No one wants to talk about this because corporations don’t want to even think about a shrinking demand market.

One way to have international birth control is to have a lottery in which those in their reproductive years would apply for a permit to reproduce without the use of fertility drugs. Numbers would be drawn at random much like we used in a lottery in WWII for the draft.

Some, perhaps many will call this idea nuts. I predict that there will be a internationally controlled population within the next fifty years.

If not the earth will take care of it for us.

Excellent article Rebecca!

Nuclear power is niether safe nor renewable. It poses an eternal threat (contamination would last through the projected life of the solar system). Global warming by comparison is transitory.
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Analysis: Why Whitman wants nuclear power

By BEN LANDO

UPI - Former New Jersey governor and federal environmental chief Christine Todd Whitman is heading one of a growing number of coalitions urging the United States to keep—and increase—nuclear energy as part of its energy mix. She’s touring the country with the new mantra that nuclear power is safer and more efficient than ever before—and, thanks to federal subsidies and potential climate-change legislation, economically competitive…

“It’s not going to be the answer for everything and the be-all-end-all only form of power,” she said. “But if you care about climate change and you care about air quality, nuclear power is really the only form of base power that doesn’t produce some of the regulated emissions and doesn’t contribute to global climate change.”

Whitman, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator from 2001 to 2003 after serving seven years as New Jersey governor, is now co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, CASEnergy. The organization, also co-chaired by activist-turned-capitalist Patrick Moore—co-founder and ex-member of Greenpeace—has launched a public relations and education blitz to convince the nation “how nuclear power can contribute to America’s energy security and economic growth,” according to its Web site.

Accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, cost overruns during the last buildup, and the once low and stable price of natural gas led to the three-decade freeze of the U.S. nuclear industry.

But energy legislation in the 1990s and two years ago streamlined the licensing process and gave the industry subsidies to grow.

...The growing clamor to address climate change has led some states, and possibly in the future the federal government, to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. That wouldn’t affect nuclear’s pricing but could make it more competitive…

As the global industry prepares to increase the number of nuclear plants, supporters in this country have become more visible, and CASE is only one of the players.

...the United States is far from an answer for storing or disposing nuclear waste…

“None of the questions have been answered,” Paul Gunter said of the nuclear opposition’s concerns. “It’s fair to say: ‘Let’s take another look.’ But when you look, nothing has really changed.”

Whitman says she thinks other energy sources are important—though she doubts the role renewables can play and says coal needs to be cleaned up but is too big a player now to go away—in weaning the country from the foreign oil that makes up 60 percent of U.S. consumption.

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Yes, this is the very same liar who assured us that the air was safe at ground zero on 9/11.